NJ museum ties George Washington Bridge to its steely past

Updated April 22, 2014 at 11:10 AM;Posted April 20, 2014 at 6:06 AM

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Dave Frieder, a photographer and bridge historian, holds a piece of George Washington Bridge suspension cable at the Roebling Museum in Florence Township. The Roebling's Sons Company, formerly on the site now occupied by the museum, manufactured the wire rope used on many other suspension spans including the Verrazano, Brooklyn and Golden Gate bridges.
(Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger)

FLORENCE TOWNSHIP — In a recent screening here at the Roebling Museum, a short black-and-white film about construction of the George Washington Bridge featured a fascinating scene in which the steel "ropes" that would eventually suspend the still-unfinished road deck dangle loosely from the vast, arching main cables hung between the two bridge towers.

The vertical suspender ropes have been stretched taut for the last 83 years, and the unfamiliar sight of them swinging in the breeze with nothing but air and the Hudson River below was a jarring reminder of their simple but vital function: to bear the weight of the upper and lower roadways crossed more than 100 million times a year by commuters, truck drivers and day trippers between New Jersey and New York.

Now, eight decades and billions of crossings since the bridge was completed in 1931, the original suspender ropes are being replaced for the first time, under a $1 billion overhaul of the bridge by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

For toll payers who use the bridge and will finance the project, the Port Authority says that will ensure the safety of the world's busiest bridge for at least as long as it's already been in use.

For the Roebling Museum, dedicated to the German-born engineer who revolutionized suspension-bridge building and designed the Brooklyn Bridge, the replacement project means some of that steel rope will be coming home, for display alongside exhibits for the Brooklyn, Golden Gate, Verrazano-Narrows and other Roebling bridges. The designer of the GWB was the Port Authority's own bridge engineer, Swiss-born Othmar Ammann.

The museum is housed in one of the few remaining buildings of the steel mill in Florence Township where the original rope for the GWB and other spans was spun before the company was dissolved in 1974.

"It would be really cool," to have some of the original GWB suspender rope, said John eitter, the museum's executive director. "I can't underestimate or overstate the importance for a museum such as ours, which does tell the story of the Roebling family and all the tremendous bridges they built, to have our visitors be able to see and touch a part of one of those bridges. It adds a whole new dimension to that experience."

(The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is named after the16th Century explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, spelled with a double-z, though the Metropolitan Transportation Authority uses only one.)

‘Look at the size’

The short film about the GWB, commissioned during construction by the Port Authority, was part of a presentation and slide show earlier this month by one of the bridge's biggest fans and informal historians, Dave Frieder, a photographer whose focus on New York City-area bridges grew out of a lifetime infatuation that started with the GWB.

It was the early 1960s, after Frieder's family moved to Bergen County from Queens, and they would cross the George Washington to visit his grandparents back in New York.

"I was 6 years old when we moved to Closter," recalled Frieder, 60, whose vertiginous stills drew audible gasps from the two dozen bridge buffs who took in his presentation. "And I would look up at the bridge in awe and say, 'Look at the size of this thing! It's humongous.' And about the time we moved to Jersey, they were building the lower roadway. And I said to myself, 'Wow, the engineer had enough foresight to allow for that.'"

View full sizeA cross section of the type of suspension cable used on the George Washington Bridge. The cable is at the Roebling Museum in Florence Township. Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger

Frieder was inspired by the black-and-white compositions of Ansel Adams, and images taken from atop the Golden Gate Bridge by John Sexton and Ron Wisner.

And starting in 1993, he spent eight years scaling the towers and arches and walking the cables of the city's major spans, including the Port Authority's Outerbridge, George Washington, Bayonne and Goethals bridges, and the MTA's Brooklyn, Manhattan, Tri-Borough and the Verrazano, which was Roebling's last bridge project.

Frieder's art is apolitical, and he shook his head when asked about the September lane-closure debacle that has roiled the administration of Gov. Chris Christie and focused unwanted attention on the GWB in recent months.

The Roebling Museum, opened in 2009, is dedicated to the John A. Roebling's Sons Co. Roebling first settled in Pennsylvania, before moving his business to Trenton in 1848.

His son Charles built a second, larger factory a few miles to the south, on a 200-acre site along the Delaware River in Florence in 1905, now the site of the museum. Adjacent to the plant, Charles also built a company town now known as Roebling, where a life-size bronze statue of the second-generation industrialist still occupies the town square.
More than a wire rope production plant like Roebling’s Trenton facilities, the Florence site, known as the Kinkora Factory, included its own state-of-the-art steel mill to supply the raw material for the steel “wire” that was the basic component of Roebling’s famous ropes and cables.

A complex process

Historical photographs, machinery and other display items at the museum recall an industrial city of brick buildings and smokestacks tucked into a bend in the Delaware, and laid out for the purpose of transforming pig iron shipped to the plant by rail into steel strands and spun rope shipped out to bridge sites on spools.

Through a complex network of furnaces, conveyors, spindles, rollers, presses and other machinery, steel rods were narrowed into lengths of heavy “wire,” dozens of which were bound into inch-thick “strands,” which were spun in groups of six around a central core strand into “ropes.”

View full sizeFrieder points out details on an actual copy of the contract plan for the George Washington BridgeâÂÂs suspension cables. The plans are housed at the museum.
Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-Ledger

For the main cables, hundreds of strands would be bound together at the construction site through a time-consuming process that involved a pulley system to relay the strands back and forth from one end of the bridge to the other and back.

The Roeblings were not all bridge work and no play, however, and the company produced the wire for the original Slinky toy. Roebling ropes were used for the elevators of the Empire State Building and the Washington Monument.
Once a hive of heavy industry abuzz with thousands of workers, the shuttered plant site was badly contaminated with heavy metals and other toxic byproducts of steel production, and designated a federal environmental Superfund site. More than 90 brick factory buildings once stood on what is now a dusty, open expanse of smoothed-over top soil trucked in as part of an ongoing cleanup that has lasted more than a decade.

Awaiting improvements

Apart from the former gatehouse and administration building now occupied by the museum, remains of the plant include a shed that housed equipment used to stretch bridge cable before it was spooled and shipped out by rail.
Like guitar strings that would quickly go flat if not stretched before being tuned, even massive bridge cables would sag under their constant tension if not pre-stretched.

The GWB overhaul was authorized by Port Authority commissioners last month, and a contract won’t be awarded until 2016, so the agency said it was not yet known where the replacement ropes will come from.

The suspender ropes measure about 3 inches in diameter, composed of 271 steel “wires” spun into seven strands bound together, said Paul Varga, an 81-year-old Roebling Museum guide who worked on the plant’s 17 miles of internal railroad from 1958 until its closing.

His father, Melchior “Mickey” Varga, started working at the plant in 1919, and Paul still lives in the company row house on Fourth Avenue where he was born.

“It was like a family,” he said of the company town.

Unlike the plant, virtually all the solid brick company housing is still standing, occupied largely by working-class families with few ties to steel rope.

An area of a dozen square blocks identified on road signs as Historic Roebling, the company town has long outlived the company.

The Roebling Museum, 100 Second Ave., Florence Township, NJ (609-499-7200). The museum is open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesday-Sunday from April through August, and Thursday-Sunday from September through December.